Religious Discussions from the South

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

The other Intro

Dear faithful readers, all two of us, let me introduce myself: my name is Roberto Mateu (call me tico), I’m also an Economist and as Federico mentioned, I have been raised in Social Catholic Environment. I have to admit that after having my typical existentialist crisis (a couple of them actually) I’ve reached a beliefs plateau, but to my knowledge it is neither stable nor unshakeable.

Just to give a little perspective I currently consider myself fairly agnostic, which is why this exercise is going to be so entertaining and even constructive. To give even more perspective, I am a major geek, so anything involving a blog, religion and a “discussion”, has to be fun.

Given this is Federico´s idea, I will wait for him to post the first commentary and then write my reactions to it, after which I will post something to discuss.

Different Interpretations

I was a bit surprised by the Tico's first post. On the one hand you can could consider adoration to Macs, Ipods and Steve Jobs a religion, but I was thinking we were going to discuss more traditional religions like catholicism, judaism, islamism, etc.In anycase, It could perhaps be a good starting point. What is a religion?Does it nedd to have a written document, does it imply that you adore someone? or something?Does it need moral principles or just a common goal or way of looking at life?Concretely, Tico has mentioned many times that if you don't follow all of the rules in catholicism, then you are not a catholic. For example, being a catholic but not going to sunday mass of cofessing "because i don't belive in that" excludes you from being a true catholic. Ok, I think I could agree with him, but two things come to mind. One, if that were absolutely true in everything then there would be no space for organizations to change and grow from within. Santo Tomas de Auino changed many things withing catholicism, he did it by being controversial and then convincing people of his way of thinking. He is now a Saint. Did he ever become a non-cathilic? From the time he first thought, this shouldn't be like this, to the point the catholic church accepted some of his ideas and changed its views, was he ever a non-catholic? that could be debatable. ut the answer is not easy, how do you set the limits? you can't be too controversial? how much is too conroversial? how much is changing the organization and how much is simply following other ideas? when are you a saint and when are you excomulgated?If we keep on changing religions and traditions (accepting homosexuality, for example) are we betraying the teachings or accepting the times? If all religions always accept the times, will we eventually have just one religion? what will be the fndamental differences?The other thing that comes to mind fro Tico's question is If I am not a catholic because I don't follow all the rules, then what am I? Am I a different religion? did I invent mine by following my own rules? Or am I still a catholic? just a bad one?I realize I have just written more than twenty questions, but I would love to hear what you think.

Intro

Hi, my name is Federico and I am an economist from Caracas, Venezuela. The objective of this blog is to publicly discuss (so everyone can comment) about religion so we can reach some conclusions. My friend Roberto (Tico) will also be posting.We are both "catholics", born in Caracas who studied in a catholic school and a catholic university. We also both decided at some point during high scool to simply put religion aside as we found many inconsistencies in what we were being taught but could not really find any answers. I really don't want to go into too many details in the intro as all these things will hopefully be discussed in subsequent posts.The idea is to initially post by subjects (for example death or heaven or confession) although I bet all subjects will be mixed up in a short time.I hope these words don't get lost in the net and we reach some definite truths that will put our minds at ease about these subjects.